As I mentioned, I went to the Indiana State Bar Association meeting today. I didn’t go to any of the social functions, but rather went to a few of the CLEs. I found them more enjoyable than average. Maybe it was the more social setting, maybe it was the shorter classes (four classes of one or two hours) rather than a day long seminar on one class. Maybe I was just goofy because I had to get up at 4:30 a.m. to take care of my daughter before driving down to Indy.
Anyway, the classes I took were on civility in appellate practice and also unpublished opinions; the new design-build option for public works; increased exemptions and the new bankruptcy law; and a ‘better business’ seminar focused on client service.
The roundtable on appellate practice was a good discussion. The consensus was that there was much less of a problem with lack of civility at the appellate level than at the trial level. There was some discussion about sloppy or misleadingly inaccurate or incomplete references to the record or caselaw. I pointed out that I figured this was a self-correcting problem because I regard it as an opportunity. If opposing counsel leaves himself open like that, I’ll point it out in a courteous manner. At the end of the day, you want the Court to rely on your brief when it has a question. If you make them uneasy about relying on the other guy’s brief because he’s telling half-truths, you’re well on your way to winning the case.
I couldn’t help but thing of Marcia Oddi and the Indiana Law Blog when the discussion came to unpublished opinions. Judge Baker indicated that when he got started, the thinking behind not publishing some opinions was that many of them are redundant and not publishing them was a way of saving attorneys from having to buy a lot more books and having to wade through a lot more case law without the extra volume particularly advancing the law in any significant way. Nowadays, the extra paper isn’t really a concern, but the extra work for little pay-off might still be a valid concern. My take is that it would be nice to have them easily available online — give us utlanders some parity with Indy attorneys who can drop by the Clerk’s office. Aside from that, I think I’d be o.k. with unpublished decisions as something you could cite to the court as persuasive, but non-precedential authority. This might not exactly square with my theoretical notions about the common law, but as a practical matter, it might be a good way to avoid responsbility for a mass of mostly redundant case law.
The design-build law seminar was a nuts & bolts affair. Basically, it took a look at the new law that allows public entities to do one-stop shopping for their (wait for it) designers and builders. The contractor and the architect can be one company. This introduces more of a subjective factor into figuring out how to award bids. Before you had your designer prepare the specs and basically you allowed builders to compete almost solely on price. More or less an apples to apples comparison. Lumping the designer and builder into one entity, there is more of an apples to oranges comparison going on, low price is not the only consideration, and there are potentially more ways to game the system. On the other hand, it streamlines things and potentially allows overall savings in public works projects, particularly smaller ones where the bifurcated bidding process is a greater percentage of the total cost of the project.
The bankruptcy seminar was entertaining, but contained an awful lot of inside baseball. If you didn’t have some familiarity with the new bankruptcy law and/or exemption law, I don’t think you’d get much out of it.
The better business, client service seminar was basically an extended reminder to say thank you to your clients for choosing you instead of someone else, keep the lines of communication open, and try to do the little things that will make your clients happy without burdening your bottom line overly much.
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